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Jennifer Lamkins

The New Heroes . Engage | PBS - 5 views

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    Becoming a social entrepreneur takes both a vision for revolutionary change and the gumption to do something about it. Students can try the games and activities on The New Heroes website to learn about the characteristics of a successful social entrepreneur and find out if they might have what it takes to transform a vision into reality. They can play a game that requires them to tackle the challenges of building a business with a social conscience. They can determine how they can make a difference by taking a quiz to find out which issues and problems most inspire them. And if they have an inspirational story or great idea for changing the world, they can share it with others on the site.
Dean Mantz

Ideas to Inspire - 0 views

  • 'Ideas to Inspire' is a collection of collaborative presentations, which offer a large number of ideas for engaging lesson activities. They are the result of the collaboration of teachers from all around the world
Clif Mims

WingClips - Free Inspirational Movie Clips for Sermon Illustrations and Teaching - 0 views

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    Now you can view inspirational movie clips from many of your favorite films. These WingClips™ can also be downloaded to use in your church, school or other non-profit organization for FREE.
Jennifer Lamkins

Visual Writing Prompts - 8 views

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    a free resource that teachers can use in their classrooms or that individuals can use as inspiration for writing
Ninja Essays

Ten great content creation tools for elearning | TrainingZone.co.uk - 0 views

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    "When it comes to elearning, traditional teaching methods do not work. Although online learning doesn't place students into the conventional classroom that inspires discussions, the entire process is still based upon interactio"
Ninja Essays

7 Resources For Essay Writing That Make a Teacher's Life Easier - 0 views

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    "What's the toughest part of your work as an educator? You are used to teaching lessons…you already have the knowledge, so it's not that difficult to express it. However, the task of motivating your students to write falls in another category. It's hard for you to take control over the process and explain how they should infuse their creativity into the rigid form of academic writing. The following 7 online resources will help you teach essay writing in a more inspiring way."
Jeff Johnson

100 great articles on educational technology 2008 - 0 views

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    I was taking a look at all the resources that I had collected during 2008 in my LearnTech Library as well as those that I had posted in the LearnTech News, to identify those that I particularly enjoyed, that inspired me, made me think and/or I just found useful. There were many, but I finally narrowed my list down to 100 (see below).  I then fed all the titles into Wordle to generate a word cloud and identify trends in this collection of my favourite resources.  Here it is -my review of 2008 - click on the image for the full-size image.
drew polly

FreeMind - free mind mapping software - 0 views

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    Free concept mapping software. Not as sophisticated as Inspiration but still useful.
Barbara Lindsey

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons - 0 views

  • The message of Wikipedia is not “trust authority” but “explore authority.” Authorized information is not beyond discussion on Wikipedia, information is authorized through discussion, and this discussion is available for the world to see and even participate in. This culture of discussion and participation is now available on any website with the emerging “second layer” of the web through applications like Diigo which allow you to add notes and tags to any website anywhere.
  • Many faculty may hope to subvert the system, but a variety of social structures work against them.
  • Our physical structures were built prior to an age of infinite information, our social structures formed to serve different purposes than those needed now, and the cognitive structures we have developed along the way now struggle to grapple with the emerging possibilities.
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  • The physical structures are easiest to see, and are on prominent display in any large “state of the art” classroom. Rows of fixed chairs often face a stage or podium housing a computer from which the professor controls at least 786,432 points of light on a massive screen. Stadium seating, sound-absorbing panels and other acoustic technologies are designed to draw maximum attention to the professor at the front of the room. The “message” of this environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that information is scarce and hard to find (that's why you have to come to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that good information is beyond discussion (that's why the chairs don't move or turn toward one another). In short, it tells students to trust authority and follow along.
  • at the base of this “information revolution” are new ways of relating to one another, new forms of discourse, new ways of interacting, new kinds of groups, and new ways of sharing, trading, and collaborating. Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking and other developments that fall under the “Web 2.0” buzz are especially promising in this regard because they are inspired by a spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration. It is this “spirit” of Web 2.0 which is important to education. The technology is secondary. This is a social revolution, not a technological one, and its most revolutionary aspect may be the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways.
  • Even in situations in which a spirit of exploration and freedom exist, where faculty are free to experiment to work beyond physical and social constraints, our cognitive habits often get in the way
  • Most of our assumptions about information are based on characteristics of information on paper.
  • Even something as simple as the hyperlink taught us that information can be in more than one place at one time
  • Blogging came along and taught us that anybody can be a creator of information.
  • Our old assumption that information is hard to find, is trumped by the realization that if we set up our hyper-personalized digital network effectively, information can find us.
  • Taken together, this new media environment demonstrates to us that the idea of learning as acquiring information is no longer a message we can afford to send to our students, and that we need to start redesigning our learning environments to address, leverage, and harness the new media environment now permeating our classrooms.
  • Nothing good will come of these technologies if we do not first confront the crisis of significance and bring relevance back into education. In some ways these technologies act as magnifiers.
  • Usually our courses are arranged around “subjects.” Postman and Weingartner note that the notion of “subjects” has the unwelcome effect of teaching our students that “English is not History and History is not Science and Science is not Art . . . and a subject is something you 'take' and, when you have taken it, you have 'had' it.” Always aware of the hidden metaphors underlying our most basic assumptions, they suggest calling this “the Vaccination Theory of Education” as students are led to believe that once they have “had” a subject they are immune to it and need not take it again.5
  • As an alternative, I like to think that we are not teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be taught. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one's self-esteem.”6 You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become central to your sense of self.
  • We can only create environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished, encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).
  • So while the course is set up much like a typical cultural anthropology course, moving through the same readings and topics, all of these learnings are ultimately focused around one big question, “How does the world work?”
  • Students are co-creators of every aspect of the simulation, and are asked to harness and leverage the new media environment to find information, theories, and tools we can use to answer our big question. Each student has a specific role and expertise to develop. A world map is superimposed on the class and each student is asked to become an expert on a specific aspect of the region in which they find themselves. Using this knowledge, they work in 15-20 small groups to create realistic cultures, step-by-step, as we go through each aspect of culture in class. This allows them to apply the knowledge they learn in the course and to recognize the ways different aspects of culture--economic, social, political, and religious practices and institutions--are integrated in a cultural system.
  • The World Simulation itself only takes 75-100 minutes and moves through 650 metaphorical years, 1450-2100. It is recorded by students on twenty digital video cameras and edited into one final "world history" video using clips from real world history to illustrate the correspondences. We watch the video together in the final weeks of the class, using it as a discussion starter for contemplating our world and our role in its future. By then it seems as if we have the whole world right before our eyes in one single classroom - profound cultural differences, profound economic differences, profound challenges for the future, and one humanity. We find ourselves not just as co-creators of a simulation, but as co-creators of the world itself, and the future is up to us.
  • I have often found myself writing content-based multiple-choice questions in a way that I hope will indicate that the student has mastered a new subjectivity or perspective. Of course, the results are not satisfactory. More importantly, these questions ask students to waste great amounts of mental energy memorizing content instead of exercising a new perspective in the pursuit of real and relevant questions.
  • When you watch somebody who is truly “in it,” somebody who has totally given themselves over to the learning process, or if you simply imagine those moments in which you were “in it” yourself, you immediately recognize that learning expands far beyond the mere cognitive dimension. Many of these dimensions were mentioned in the issue precis, “such as emotional and affective dimensions, capacities for risk-taking and uncertainty, creativity and invention,” and the list goes on. How will we assess these? I do not have the answers, but a renewed and spirited dedication to the creation of authentic learning environments that leverage the new media environment demands that we address it.
  • The new media environment provides new opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our students seeking important and meaningful questions.
  • This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,” in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that ask students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases.
Dean Mantz

eMINTS - 0 views

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    The eMINTS National Center is a non-profit, independent business unit of the University of Missouri. eMINTS offers professional development programs created by educators for educators. Leading experts have collaborated to produce programs that * inspire educators to use instructional strategies powered by technology * engage students in the excitement of learning * enrich teaching to dramatically improve student performance eMINTS changes how teachers teach and students learn. Its instructional model provides a research-based approach to organizing instruction and can be implemented in any subject area at any level.
Clif Mims

Twiducate.com - Social Networking For Schools - 11 views

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    Teachers can create an online community for their students. "Share inspiration, ideas, reading, thoughts. Post discussions, deadlines, homework. Instrantly create surveys for students. Keep parents informed of daily projects." "Not only will twiducate.com give your students the web 2.0 skills they need, but also expand their reading, writing, thoughts and ideas beyond the classroom setting."
Ninja Essays

6 Web Tools to Boost Student Engagement - 0 views

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    Not all colleges and professors are trying to find effective resources that would make today's students more engaged in the learning process. There is a high percentage of college students that are "actively disengaged" simply because they cannot get inspired by the teaching methods they are subjected to.
Dean Mantz

WritingFix: Mentor Text Lessons...inspired by Literature & Classic Poetry - 0 views

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    Home of interactive writing prompts
Ben Rimes

The Future of Less: How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education - 0 views

  • Today, we've gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It's only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions
  • "We said, 'Let's create a university that actually measures learning,' " Mendenhall says. "We do not have credit hours, we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and on that basis, award the degree."
  • Hulu.com, launched just 18 months ago, is widely considered to be the first Web site to prove that mass broadcast-television viewing as we know it can and will shift online. Hulu did that by being attractive, well-designed, and easy to use, and by having a viable business model with actual paying advertisers -- and soon, subscribers.
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  • He has also offered five of his courses to anyone on the Web for free; he donates his own time to review nonenrolled students' work, awarding a signed certificate in lieu of course credit. Wiley's most recent open course was formatted as an online role-playing game, with students divided into "guilds" completing "quests" -- a learning community inspired by the world of online gamers. "If you didn't need human interaction and someone to answer your questions, then the library would never have evolved into the university," Wiley says. "We all realize that content is just the first step."
  • If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can't cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then -- before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world's largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world's largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.
Dean Mantz

National Educational Technology Plan - 9 views

  • The plan will provide a set of concrete goals that can inform state and local educational technology plans as well as inspire research, development, and innovation.
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